from hinduism to atheism

I am looking for former stories of hindus who became atheists. I am writing a book on people who leave their religion and embrace secularism. I am including my story as a former muslim. I will include other religions as well. anyone who wants their story please contact me.

Replies to This Discussion

I am happy to note that you are writing a book on people who have embraced secularism. Selina, I would like to suggest that you should write a book on atheism and not on secularism.

Now about me. I am an oldie of 72 but I have become an atheist 40 years before. I became an atheist purely on the basis of my freethought and rationalism. I had not read any literature on atheism and I was not even fully aware the status of science then. Thus I am a completely selfmade atheist. Science can be a great help to athists today as it has progressed much.

I have noted that hardly anybody visits this site. I hope that you will get enough replies.

I pretty much grew up in a Brahmin household, and many of my extended family members are extremely conservative Vaishnavite Brahmins. Much to the point of out and out bigotry unto other castes. My parents, otoh, were not quite so serious, and my father was an atheist long before I was born. My mother, though "accused" of being an atheist by her sisters and such was probably more of a pragmatist... though to this day, she is still a subscriber of most Hindu-specific superstitions (such as Rahu Kaalam and so on).

I don't know that I could say that we were quite the most serious "practicers" of Hinduism per se, but the occasional temple rounds, doing pujas and harathis when moving to new locations, studying the Vedanta and Puranas and so on was normal for us on a day to day basis. I also studied (and to this day still study) Carnatic Music, though my attitudes about it have almost always been pretty purely academic and theoretical on a musical level. I still absolutely adore it for that aspect, and I've added some Hindustani to my knowledge base in the years since.

In terms of my transition to atheism... it's hard to say that there was any transition per se. Whatever else we were in my family, we were still South Indian Brahmins, and that meant that most of us were engineers of some variety. I am one even now. That meant that though we had the Gita and Mahabharata and Ramayana and so on on our bookshelves, the far more dominant content on the shelves included books on mathematics, science, engineering, and music theory. And this always fascinated me even more. My job today is as an engineer in the movie industry, but it is literally a role where my job involves being the guy who bridges the gap between art and science. I end up doing work on how Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect can be connected to the shininess of people's hair (I'm actually not kidding here). This is the sort of stuff that always fascinated me as a kid, and I think that even as a very small child, I was at best apathetic towards the idea of God's existence. I didn't care so much if God really did make rain fall as much as I was interested in HOW God made the rain fall. As I read more and more, though, I just found that everywhere where people could actually explain things, there was no mention of God, and every time my grandparents, aunts/uncles, teachers, etc. tried to talk about God's place in things, it was always something that didn't quite add up. It often tended to be about questions being "proof" in and of itself, and that never made any sense to me.... at the time, I was too little and not well-read enough to be familiar with logical fallacies, but I realize now that they were all arguments from ignorance.

So I came out as an atheist in front of my teachers in school -- I was 4 yrs old at the time. It didn't go over well. The best argument they could muster when simply faced with question after question was to tie up my feet and hang me upside down from a hook in the ceiling. I also didn't get much appreciation from my classmates who would thereafter delight in kicking me out of my seat and so on for the crime of doubt. Usually, this garnered the reaction from the teachers that "maybe if [I] had the fear of God in me, this wouldn't be happening." After coming to the U.S., I probably got more grief from my classmates for the crime of not being white than for not being a believer... however, the teachers were probably worse. Anytime something happened like somebody's item gets lost or stolen (even if it was from a class I'd never been to), I became the scapegoat -- with the explanation that I was the first suspect for anything because I'm an atheist, and therefore an evil child. I kid you not that they didn't mince their words either in calling me evil. It's funny too because this was at a magnet school which is even now a highly regarded focused-on-math&science academy in the Chicago area. I never really cared. I was not interested in how people looked at me -- I was only interested in what was factually true, and that's all that ever mattered to me. It still is to this day.

Nonetheless, I would say that I still culturally identified as a Hindu for quite some time even if I didn't really believe any of it. That feeling probably died after college. I think the only reason why I was able to do that at all was because Hinduism is so incredibly generic and vague that you could pretty much subscribe to anything and still be technically Hindu. You can literally believe that it is your divine duty to murder people and there is something in Vedanta to support that. It is so permissive that there's room to believe anything you want. You can buy into Christian or Muslim doctrine while at the same time still accepting Hindu beliefs simultaneously (and yes, it does happen -- it was famously problematic for Catholic missionaries who tried to convert people, and found that many would accept Christianity without ever actually rejecting their Hindu beliefs -- they'd simply fold Jesus into the picture). In any case, I killed off that aspect of my position not just because I grew more apathetic towards Hindu belief, but also because I was effectively making the same apology for Hinduism that Christians or Muslims or Jews do for the more deplorable aspects of their religious doctrines. I mean, I was aware for instance that the Bhagavad Gita says murder is okay... but then I was accounting for the fact that even though the Gita is not technically "scripture" and the Vedas don't specifically say anything like that, it says murder is okay because that is a valid interpretation of the otherwise vague statements that actually are in the Vedas. I couldn't, in good conscience allow that of myself while simultaneously condemning cherry-picking of other mythologies. So I dropped my cultural identifier of Hindu entirely.

Although I have always had my ire roused by those who are anti-science and anti-rational thinking, and religious lobbyists in this country and so on... I don't think I was quite as vocal about it until after high school. Although I'd always wanted to get into putting my thoughts to paper, I don't think I would have considered it a realistic endeavor until these last few years where we now have an abundance of atheist and secularist literature on the market. As such I've also started on my own work which is sort of a personal "rationalist manifesto" of sorts. Not very far along, I have to admit (only about 90 pages right now, and I'm barely anywhere in delivering the points I'd like to)... but I'm at least a little more serious about it now than I would have been some years ago.

"Don't call me Sir" is the second time I am coming across. Previously one gentleman. He is 40+. Mr.Amer, an atheist. I am 70+ Now you will think why we should waste time spending with an old person. Of course you may be correct. What could I do? Time has left on its own. I could not keep it with me, secured. Now even without mentioning my age, you could have understand I am an old man. OK.Bye.